Two former eBay Inc security executives have been sentenced to jail on Thursday for ending up a advertising and marketing marketing campaign to harass and intimidate a Massachusetts couple by way of threats and disturbing home deliveries after their on-line publication drew the ire of the company’s then-CEO.
Jim Baugh and David Harville have been sentenced to 57 and 24 months in jail, respectively, for his or her roles in an intensive harassment advertising and marketing marketing campaign that involved sending the couple cockroaches, a funeral wreath and a bloody Halloween pig masks.
US District Select Patti Saris, who imposed the sentence all through hearings in Boston, known as it a “hard-to-imagine” scheme fuelled by a “toxic custom” on the Silicon Valley e-commerce agency.
“It was extreme and outrageous,” Saris said.
She ordered Baugh, eBay’s former senior director of safety and security, and Harville, its former director of worldwide resilience, to moreover pay fines of $40,000 and $20,000 US, respectively, after pleading accountable to cyberstalking-related bills.
From Baugh’s accountable plea in April:
Former eBay authorities pleads accountable to his place in a cyberstalking advertising and marketing marketing campaign that targeted a Natick, Mass. couple https://t.co/7BjU9rr4dE
In court docket docket, they each apologized to David and Ina Steiner, a married couple in Natick, Mass., who produced the publication EcommerceBytes and spoke of being relentlessly terrorized by eBay’s staff.
“As brokers of eBay, they made our lives a dwelling hell,” David Steiner instructed the determine.
Lurid
Prosecutors said senior executives deemed the publication important of eBay and a threat to its enterprise, and in August 2019 then-Chief Govt Officer Devin Wenig texted one different authorities that it was time to “take her down,” referring to Ina Steiner.
Wenig, a former Thomson Reuters authorities who stepped down as eBay’s CEO in September 2019, was not charged, though seven completely different people have been. A spokesperson said Wenig had “utterly zero information” of the actions they undertook.

Overseeing the advertising and marketing marketing campaign was Baugh, a former Central Intelligence Firm employee who, consistent with his lawyer, felt stress to do one factor.
At Baugh’s path, the Steiners acquired anonymous, harassing Twitter messages, bizarre emails, and undesirable home deliveries like spiders and a e-book on surviving the dearth of a accomplice, prosecutors said.
It was moreover alleged that pornographic magazines with the husband’s title on it have been despatched to a neighbor’s dwelling, and a Craigslist advert posted inviting occasions to sexual encounters on the victims’ home.
Civil case wonderful
Prosecutors said completely different eBay staff involved included Harville, who Baugh recruited with a contractor for an “op” to surveillance the Steiners and to attempt unsuccessfully to place in a GPS tracker on their automotive.
EBay apologized to the Steiners remaining yr.
“The misconduct of these former staff was unsuitable, and we’ll do what’s truthful and acceptable to aim to deal with what the Steiners went by way of,” the company said. “The events from 2019 must on no account have occurred, and as eBay expressed to the Steiners, we’re very sorry for what they endured.”
The couple have sued the company and Wenig, amongst others, with the Boston Globe reporting throughout the spring that makes an try and settle the lawsuit out of court docket docket have up to now failed.